"I'll Be Back" by The Beatles

The Beatles, being genius imitators, end up on the primitive end of the spectrum. They had almost nothing to say (when they did have something to say, as on the original lyrics to "Get Back," they ended up discarding them to release a friendlier song), yet wrote great love songs. I chose this cut from A Hard Day's Night, one of my favorite songs of theirs, because it introduces some of the concepts I'm going to explain in a very simple form. Another Beatles song I'd considering choosing is "It Won't Be Long" from With the Beatles, which always puts me in a romantic and energetic mood.

You know, if you break my heart I'll go/But I'll be back again/Cause I told you once before 'goodbye'/But I came back again/.../This time I will show/That I'm not trying to pretend/I want to go/But I hate to leave you/You know I hate to leave you/Oooh-oooh-oooh-ooooh/You, if you break my heart I'll go/But I'll be back again.

When we first love it's very casual. It's probably not real love, but it's as much as we know. That's what Lennon's singing about; the way we can casually expect someone we consider so special to always be there. In the Jungian frame of mind, I'd say we typically take for granted the balance we have--or think we have--in our youth. Except in cases of extreme abuse or disorder, the major issues surface in young adulthood, as we first come to face jobs, serious relationships, our own families, and all the pressures which caused our parents to inflict our original issues upon us. Lennon--as I sort of assume was the case in real life--didn't really know what he was saying here, but it sounded nice (this was the man who drove a gold Rolls Royce while pretending to rebel, after all). Does he really love her when he says "love"? I doubt it. He doesn't seem to really regard her as a person, yet can't understand why she'd want to leave him. He also introduce that idea of space-time, with the refrain: "But I'll be back again." And it's not the first time it's happened. He's talking about feeling divided from himself, from his anima, in Jung's terms. But he's a boy, not a man. He can't appreciate his woman and won't let her appreciate him, because there's not much of him to appreciate. Here he seems to be simply recounting a history, in vague and primitive words which never elaborate, but obviously mean something to him. This is the first stepping stone because it introduces, so briefly, the intermingling of love and time--and remember, time is not an inherent mental concept--without elaborating and developing as some of our other songwriters will. Also, I should quickly mention that many of these songs feature loping, circling, repetitive melodies, which invoke time in its cyclical form. I realize that approach to melody is part of pop music in general, but it's still a truth in this context. I love the ending guitar melody, after the vocal dies, in particular. It's more sensitive than a lot of Lennon's stuff, and makes me wonder if McCartney, the healthier of the two, had more to do with the music.